newsminer.com

Dee Dee Hammond

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Friday released an updated plan for oil and natural gas development in the northeast corner of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The agency’s preferred alternative could make as much as 3.2 million acres available to leasing around the environmentally sensitive Teshekpuk Lake as early as this fall. The area being considered for leasing is mostly located south and east of the lake.

However, the agency is proposing deferring for a decade leasing on an additional 430,000 acres of the most sensitive areas north and east of the lake.

The plan would also permanently remove from leasing some 219,000 acres of the lake itself and its island.

The area around the lake holds the greatest potential for oil and gas discoveries, but it is also the summer home of thousands of migratory birds and an important subsistence hunting ground for the region’s Inupiat Eskimos.

Previous attempts to lease acreage around the lake have met with legal challenges from environmental and local Alaska Native groups, which argued that the agency failed to take into account the cumulative impact of drilling in the adjacent northwest planning area on the lake’s migratory birds, caribou and other arctic wildlife.

BLM environmental analyst Jim Drucker said the updated report should dampen criticism from environmentalists and other groups that have opposed development in the past.

North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta called the revised plan a “win-win.”

Environmental groups that have been fighting the Bush administration over its push to allow oil and gas development in the area around the lake were cautiously optimistic upon hearing about the revised plan.

“The key thing that is really important is that they are opening to leasing the key goose molting area and caribou calving grounds north and east of the lake, but they are deferring it for 10 years,” said Pam Miller, Arctic coordinator for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. “It’s a victory that they are not planning to lease it right away, but it’s clearly not as protected as it was under the previous plan.”

The BLM leased nearly 1.5 million acres in the northeast planning area to ConocoPhillips and several other oil companies in 1999 and 2002. Currently, 87 percent of the northeast portion of the reserve is open for development.

Friday’s announcement opens land south and east of the lake. A final decision on whether to schedule a lease sale is expected in the third week of June.

The areas being considered for lease hold an estimated 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

The agency previously awarded rights to explore 81 oil and gas tracts on 940,000 acres around Teshekpuk Lake, but a federal judge blocked the sale of acreage around the lake after critics argued the government had failed to consider the cumulative impact of drilling in the adjacent northwest planning area.

The new report also takes into account the potential impacts of federal and state leasing in the Chukchi Sea to the west of NPR-A and the possibility of a natural gas pipeline project.

“This plan provides a balanced approach to energy development and wildlife protection and forms a solid basis for the Bureau of Land Management to proceed with an oil and gas lease sale later this year,” Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said.

The revised development plan could have been better for the environmental community — it does remove nearly 100 stipulations on leasing that were established under the 1998 plan — but it also could have been worse, Miller said.

However, Miller said BLM could have proceeded to offer leases in the northwest planning area without revising the environmental impact study, but she said she was pleased that the agency worked closely with North Slope Inupiat villages.

“On balance, this is the Bush administration, so we have to give them credit for listening to folks on the North Slope and not blazing forward with leasing in the goose molting areas,” she said.

Environmentalists have made the Teshekpuk Lake area a priority since President Bush first proposed developing the region in 2005.

The lake is part of the Indiana-sized NPR-A, which the federal government set aside for its energy potential in 1923. The region’s remoteness and lack of infrastructure have left it undeveloped so far, but rising oil prices have spurred new interest in the area.